The remains were discovered by lead diver Alberto Nava and his colleagues on the floor of a flooded pit 130 feet from the surface. Among them were parts of more than 30 animal skeletons, including the nearly intact skull and skeleton of a teenage girl of around 16 who had fallen to her death in the pit at the end of the last Ice Age some 13,000 years ago. Also found were fossils of Ice Age megafauna such as saber-tooth cats and huge Shasta ground sloths.

The researchers used the state-of-the art SunCAVE (Cave Automatic Virtual Environment) at QI, which allowed scientists associated with a NOVA documentary to interact with, map and measure the fossils, as well as plan future diving missions. QI and CHEI are an integral part of the Hoyo Negro Project – working with the technical dive time to develop optimal image acquisition strategies, creating the high-resolution digital models, and powering the visual analytics necessary to bring this remote site to the scientific community.

The QI effort is being led by Rissolo, an archaeologist who has been working in the Yucatan for 25 years, as well as cultural heritage engineering specialists Falko Kuester, Vid Petrovic and Eric Lo. Many of the researchers studying the site’s diverse Ice Age fauna will never have a chance to go there. Not only has the virtual “twin” of the site enabled paleontologists to study the bones remotely, but they are making discoveries in the data – bones and tell-tale features that have eluded detection by divers at the bottom of the deep dark pit.

Exploring an environment that only few have seen before, yet to be the first to see it as a whole and in its full beauty, combining site-scale context with the finest possible details captured by its digital twin for in-depth analysis, is truly transformative, says Falko Kuester, Professor for Visualization and Virtual Reality at CHEI.

“Not only is the virtual cave essential for a comprehensive fossil inventory,” writes NOVA Next writer Evan Hadingham, “it enables the team to take measurements and print accurate 3D replicas of specific bones, including Naia’s skull.” Explorers on the most recent National Geographic-funded mission to Hoyo Negro used the virtual SunCAVE to plan their excursion in detail, which ultimately allowed them to bring up parts of eleven ancient animals, some of them previously unknown.